Baroque and the Fugue

One of the most characteristic forms of music of the Baroque era is definitely the complex and polyphonic fugue. It is built of many independent equally important melodies that are masterely combined with each other into an extravaganza of polyphony. The kind of polyphony used in the fugue form is imitative. Imitation can be made strict or not strict, and fugues use the latter form most of the time (strict imitative polyphony is found in a canon). Fugue is therefore a very complex work, as non-strict imitative polyphony requires compositional skills that go beyond simple melody and accompaniment. Fugues go well beyond that, and for the beginning listeners of fugues they sound very uncomprehendable and hard to grasp. This is probably because people in general are used to homophonic music with one dominating melody line. However, fugues are not difficult to get used to, you just need to listen and follow all melody lines with equal focus, then the magic and genius of this musical form and the composer who wrote it will emerge.

Fugue has a main subject melody that is the overlapped by other voices that are made up from the subject. A big number of melodies may spring forward from one subject, get varied, and assembled into a network of music. To get a good feel for what a good fugue is about try to listen to J.S. Bach fugues. His big work, 'The Art of Fugue', is one good example of this Baroque extravaganza. But even other of his compositions (e.g. 'The well-tempered Clavier') make use of this composition technique.

Fugue exposition is the initial part of the fugue, where each of the voices successively comes in until they all are up and running. At this point they should melt together and be well balanced. Each voice starts by playing the subject melody (in its own fashion, can be transposed) and then continues with something called countersubject. This countersubject is the difference between a canon and a fugue - in a canon, the subject is simply repeated and imitated from the first voice until the music ends. In fugue however, the countersubject is developing from the subject, to avoid repetitive music. This is what is meant by non-strict imitation.

The voices that enter the fugue exposition are coming in in a special order. They are either the lowest or the highest relative to the voice(s) that are already running. This is simply to create enough contrast in music, otherwise the new entering voices could be experienced too dull and unnoticed.

Other fugue parts are called episodes, wherein the subjects are reintroduced in different tonalities and variations, changed and elaborated further. There can be many such episodes in a fugue, and they are usually shortly interrupted by restatements of the original subjects. The whole composition ends by re-exposition of the initial subject, and then finally a last concluding part called coda.

Listen to the fugues of J.S. Bach (see CDs below) to get the feel for this superb form of composition. Think about what you've read here and simply follow the melodies in all voices, notice how they half-imitate each other and how they get transformed during the different episodes. That's what a fugue is all about.